The Word Exchange (14 page)

That’s the last thing I remember before I fell back to sleep.

OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS

How the Meme Is Replacing the I

By The International Diachronic Society

Published: November 20

For many of us, it’s hard to remember a time when print books were in wide circulation. So hard, in fact, that the word “book” sounds antiquated and quaint when applied to a bound rather than “beamable” document. (Most people, of course, now use the word “limn” even for print volumes. But we authors hope you’ll forgive our small anachronism.) Yet as difficult as it is to recall, it wasn’t actually so very long ago that books, magazines, and even news appeared primarily on paper. Certainly, when considered against the vast, varied curtain of human civilization, it’s been barely any time at all.

It was nearly six hundred years ago that German inventor Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press, thus enabling the mass reproduction of inexpensive, uniform texts. A library, no longer the sole province of clergy and kings, was something common men could aspire to amass. Within decades books became ubiquitous, reading a veritable phenomenon. Gutenberg’s innovation led directly to the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the scientific revolution. And the bound codex proved surprisingly enduring as a technology: books persisted more or less in their original form until the beginning of this century.

Even today a few books and periodicals are published on paper. But they’re certainly the exception. And media executives who make this choice often do so to evoke nostalgia or spark publicity, as when this newspaper’s editors celebrated its sixty thousandth “printing” a few years ago by putting out a supplement only in ink. Another example would be Marcus Hapgood’s recent national bestseller,
Book: How Bound Volumes Unbind Minds
, which sold nearly half a million copies in print—although, notably, it was made available in only print form for the first six months after publication.

In contrast, readers—what we once called “e-readers”—have been commonplace for little more than a decade. And as unbelievable as it may now seem, Synchronic, Inc.’s popular Meme
^™
was introduced only four years ago. While safety concerns over the patented Crown
^™
, Ear Bead
^™
, and Sixth Sense
^™
technology have restricted sales in some parts of the world—i.e., Canada, the United Kingdom, and most former EU countries—Memes are nonetheless hugely popular worldwide. More than 100 million units have been sold globally to date.

Even the controversial microchip, introduced last year, has been a surprising—some might say alarming—success. Exact implantation figures aren’t available; technically, of course, microchips are intended only for people with specific physical or neurological limitations, and Synchronic has been reluctant to release data on off-label use. But we all know that the chip’s reputation for enhanced “neuronal efficiency” has resulted in much more pervasive adaptation—by at least 12 to 15 million people, some experts claim. (Memes utilizing microchips are reportedly far better at exploiting the devices’ EEG technology to decipher and transmit electrical signals between the device and its user’s brain.) It’s rumored that the next generation of the Meme, slated for public release very shortly, is even more “efficient.” Allegedly in development for years, it’s supposed to function in a wholly new way.

The apparatus, it seems, has lived up to its name. (The word “meme,” coined by British scientist Richard Dawkins in 1976, means an idea, pattern of behavior, practice, or style that spreads quickly from person to person within a given cultural context. It’s derived from the Greek μιμημα, “that which is imitated.”)

In just a few short years the Meme has completely transformed the technological landscape, influencing everything from how we interact to how we’re entertained, how we shop and pay for things to how we receive certain medical treatments, how we’re educated to how we express ourselves creatively. Even how we eat and sleep. Some might say that machines and users have become so intimately entangled that to presume any boundary would be fallacious.

In many ways these remarkable changes have been a boon. The switch from print to digital media has of course saved tens of milined,
lions of trees. (Even though discarded devices are damaging the environment in other ways, this step toward protecting forests seems worth underscoring.) And the Meme’s advances in medicine, child and elder care, education, transportation, security, even prison reform have been much and duly lauded.

Memes have done everything from reducing traffic deaths, with Chauffeur™, to revolutionizing security, thanks to Safe™. This year Artiste™ was largely credited when the Artes Mundi went to a twelve-year-old girl. The controversial Ware™ helps monitor the movements of small children and the elderly, not to mention parolees. Some claim that Substitute™ is responsible for increasing student test scores in underfunded schools. Memes’ contributions to the field of medicine are perhaps best documented: MD™ has unburdened doctors by facilitating many diagnoses. And Memes have obviated the need for some pharmaceuticals by offering a wide variety of treatments for everything from anxiety to pain, high blood pressure, ADD, and even addictions. The therapies are especially effective, ostensibly, in microchipped users. One small clinical study published in August (
J Affect Disord
) suggests that they might decrease the risk of suicide in certain populations by nearly 60 percent: interceding when they sense negative thinking and calling family and friends, or, in extreme cases, suicide hotlines and 911. They can even deliver mild electroconvulsive therapy. For many, Memes are life-saving.

But naturally, as with any new technology, they also have their detractions. For example, several highly publicized lawsuits have been settled in cases of Meme “misfires,” as they’ve come to be known. Instances when Memes have commandeered user data not simply to predict but to
guide
behavior: gestures as innocent—and difficult to prove—as generating vindictive beams and tempting one to send them, ordering more drinks when you should go home, or purveying a wink to a lovely young woman—who isn’t your wife. But Memes have also been known to precipitate disastrous outcomes: destroyed credit, bankruptcy, eviction. Or worse.

Rather than catalog a long litany of the Meme’s dangers, however, we’ll focus on the sphere of our greatest concern: communication. How we write and read. How we listen and speak, including to ourselves. In other words, how we think. It’s comforting to
believe that consigning small decisions to a device frees up our brains for more important things. But that begs the question, which things have been deemed more important? And what does our purportedly decluttered mind now allow us to do? Express ourselves? Concentrate? Think? Or have we simply carved out more time for entertainment? Anxiety? Dread?

We fear that Memes may have a paradoxical effect—that indeed, contrary to Synchronic’s claims, they tend to narrow rather than expand consciousness, to the point where our most basic sense of self—our interior I—has started to be eclipsed. Our facility for reflection has dimmed, taking with it our skill for deep and unfettered thinking. And another change is taking place: our capacity for communication is fading.

In the most extreme cases, Meme users have been losing language. Not esoteric bits of linguistic debris but everyday words: ambivalence, paradox, naive. The more they forget, the more dependent on the device they become, a frightening cycle that only amplifies and that has grown to engulf another of Synchronic’s innovations, the Word Exchange.

As most of you will know, the Exchange is a proprietary online marketplace that consists of hundreds of thousands of terms, downloadable as definitions, translations, synonyms, and antonyms, at 2 cents per word (as of this morning’s publication). It seems to have been modeled on early digital music stores and Synchronic’s own wildly successful Internet bazaar for limns, encompassing both a web presence and attendant device applications.

Once—and not so long ago—the Exchange was considered fairly useless and fringe. It certainly wasn’t aimed at logophiles, or those of us who study words for a living. The quality was poor, for one; when Synchronic began to gather content, making mass word acquisitions, it watered most of them down and jettisoned “redundancies.” Moreover, legitimate resources are still extant (as of today): specifically, the
North American Dictionary of the English Language (NADEL)
and the
Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
. Professionals (the few of us that remain) tend to prefer these.

But the Exchange also didn’t seem to be a site most civilians would have much cause to use, particularly since free online dictionaries and other reference tools existed until very recently. (We
confess that when these sometimes less than rigorous resources started disappearing over the past year or two, we didn’t necessarily mourn their loss as we ought have, and we may not have given enough thought to the cause: whether their developers simply lost interest in keeping them up or in fact they were being systematically dismantled.) Of course, some people encountering unknown words may also occasionally have looked them up in old print dictionaries. But it seems far safer to assume that more often they skipped over them—back when they could. When it was still possible for them to make themselves understood and comprehend the words around them without the Exchange or Memes.

A few years ago, if we’d been asked to name the Exchange’s target demographic, we would have been hard pressed. We might have guessed college freshmen, analysts “punching up” time-crunched reports, perhaps those in need of a quick translation—of a warning label, say. What we absolutely failed to anticipate was that a day could come when average intelligent adults would be forced to consult the Exchange simply to get through the day’s e-mail, parent-teacher conferences, the news. (Perhaps some of you are deploying it right now, to read this.) Suffice it to say that as our idiom shrinks, the Word Exchange has become far more lucrative.

We hope you’ll forgive us a brief history of the Exchange; we gather that for those outside the very small (and shrinking) precinct of the publishing industry, it remains fairly opaque. Seven years ago, when Synchronic was still a relatively modest start-up, its chief executive, Steve Brock, approached the CEOs of several major publishing conglomerates and offered them a deal: a significant one-time payment for the digital copyright to all dictionary, thesaurus, and other word-reference tools; an annual remittance every year thereafter (not to exceed 25 percent of the initial payment nor fall below 12.5 percent) for access to and ownership of any new terms; and point-of-purchase royalties (not to exceed 10 percent nor fall below 4 percent) for each downloaded term. Many of them refused outright at first. But most eventually capitulated as the one-time remuneration settlement was adjusted upward and as they watched their competitors relent.

The fact is that the publishing industry was then in dire straits. While it hadn’t yet collapsed, it was on the brink. And though most
publishers were loath to sell even the digital copyright to their content, their parent companies’ executives exerted pressure on them. In the end most publishers agreed primarily because they didn’t think there would ever be a real market for downloadable definitions. In a sense, Synchronic’s money seemed free. And the promise of royalties, should things work out otherwise, helped make the deal seem more appealing.

But most of us know money is never free. One publisher after another shuttered dictionaries in an effort to cut costs and keep other enterprises going. Later, as more and more houses filed for bankruptcy, more and more words passed into the sole domain of the Exchange. Eventually publishers lost their definitions by default. (The only holdout in the United States was the
NADEL
, protected from shareholder pressure by its status as a nonprofit.)

Before the end of dictionaries, it seemed to all of us that publishers were right: users would never pay to download meanings from the Exchange. All that changed, however, with the advent of the Meme. Suddenly users could get definitions right on their machines: tap a term and a pop-up appeared, the word charged straight to their Synchronic accounts.

At first people tended to use this service sparingly, such as for science and medical vocabulary. But more quickly than we could have imagined—as Meme users’ own language began to corrode, we only later speculated—they embraced the new interface, weaving it seamlessly into their experience of language. (Some might even argue that as the devices became ever faster and “smarter,” seeming almost to foresee wants and needs, users’ consciousness over the decision to download words depleted.) And the price of words is so cheap—fifty for a dollar—that it must have seemed worth looking up any term that was even slightly unfamiliar (the number of which, as already noted, has increased exponentially).

And indeed, the words
are
cheap. But ironically, “adding value” to words has only
decreased
their worth. By putting a price (a very low price) on language, Synchronic has depreciated it immeasurably. Over time, attitudes toward words have changed. Now, rather than commit them to memory, many simply use “memory,” relegating that chore to their Memes.

This is how we’ve arrived at our current crisis: our capacity
for language—and perhaps, then, thought—becoming so seriously compromised that even scanning headlines, telling bedtime stories, greeting family this week for Thanksgiving, have become tasks requiring help from a device.

This is probably as opportune a time as any to parse the meaning of the word “synchronic.” According to the
NADEL
, the term was developed by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in 1913; applied to the study of language, it means that which is descriptive of a particular fixed moment in time, generally the present, rather than considered in light of historical precedent. It’s a remarkably apt name for a corporation that, wittingly or not, promotes an ethos of accelerated obsolescence, shortsightedness, and privileging of the present over future or past, promoting the potential erasure not just of individual reminiscences but of our collective human memory. “Diachronic” means essentially the opposite. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that when it came time several years ago for the authors of this editorial to adopt a name, we chose the Diachronic Society. The analogy is inexact—in linguistics, these terms are value-neutral—but we nonetheless thought the appellation fitting. When it comes to lexicography, as with most things, we prefer a long view. Words are alluvial, like rock formations. Phonemes are arbitrary. Meanings aren’t: they accrue from shared experience.